The Boring Life of a Private Investigator

WHEN I first became a private investigator, I was enthralled by the idea of the brash gumshoe who was modeled on the American cowboy and incubated in the pulps — a lawless lone wolf.

The writer Carroll John Daly captured the allure in a 1923 story: “I’m what you might call the middleman — just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks,” he had a private eye confess. “I do a little honest shooting once in a while — just in the way of business. But my conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy what didn’t need it.”

Daly and many others who followed him helped romanticize the rule-flouting investigator, and created a world that inspired some people to believe that’s how real private eyes should behave. That’s why fans of the genre need a less felonious detective story, a yarn with more document review and less dark arts that puts the gumshoes in the law’s good graces.

Lawbreaking private eyes, real and imagined, do a disservice to us all. Honest investigators help ensure that our legal system, our financial institutions and other corners of American life remain fair and transparent. Corporate investigators play a crucial, if often discreet, role in global transactions. We track down missing assets, help bring about global acquisitions through due diligence, uncover public corruption and investigate fraud within companies and nonprofits. Dozens of investigators are supporting Irving H. Picard, the trustee who has so far recovered more than $10 billion on behalf of the victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

In my very early days as an investigator, I thought I was granted the authority to do things ordinary citizens could not: use false pretexts to obtain information, impersonate, infiltrate. I was wrong. My first assignment was a background check, which consisted of database research. My second assignment, to trace the source of counterfeit apparel goods, promised more intrigue, but my role was simply to buy shirts online.

At last, I was granted permission to channel Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Working with a former F.B.I. agent, who was armed, I tailed the chief executive of a media company to see if we could catch him meeting with a competitor to discuss a merger. My partner and I sat in a Zipcar outside the Carlyle hotel for seven hours listening to the radio. The executive never made an escape — at least not one we caught.

How did P.I.s get their reputation for working outside the law? It isn’t just fiction. In 1867, the detective Allan Pinkerton wrote that a Pinkerton man should be “pure and above reproach.” But by the turn of the century, his firm’s violent union-busting tactics, employed on behalf of industrialists, led some states to ban the use of firms like Pinkerton’s.

The tradition continued into more recent times. In 2005, private investigators, hired by Hewlett-Packard to uncover the source of media leaks about the company, used Social Security numbers of H.P. directors to assume their identities and obtain their phone records. In 2008, the Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano was imprisoned for, among other things, bribing telephone company employees to help him eavesdrop and paying police officers to obtain private information on his targets.

Not long ago, private detectives enlisted by the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World were imprisoned as part of the scandal that included hacking into the voice mails of royals, famous actors, British lawmakers, a murder victim and soccer stars. (Some journalists were also imprisoned.) In the past few months, several private investigators in New York and California have come under scrutiny by the authorities, resulting in some indictments, for hacking into email accounts, and bribing law enforcement officers to obtain rap sheets.

Some crooked P.I.s relish their seedy reputations and the publicity of their own misdeeds. And surely many people hire private detectives precisely because they assume we know how, and are willing, to find information by any means necessary.

In my work, I am routinely asked to break the law. An attorney once suggested that I bribe a bank officer for account numbers and balances. This could lead to charges of commercial bribery, unlawful possession of personal identification information and larceny. Felonies. A spurned husband once asked me to hack into his wife’s Facebook account and bug her phone and car — which would include computer tampering, trespassing and eavesdropping. Felonies. I’ve been asked to obtain flight manifests, steal trade secrets and impersonate mailmen. Felony. Felony. Felony.

To counter the misconception that investigators are crooks, some in my field explicitly brand themselves as law abiding. After all, the work we do isn’t always the stuff of gripping literature, but it is socially necessary. The website of the British corporate intelligence company Focus states that its asset tracing is “done to legally adducible standards.” The Mintz Group, where I once worked, tells clients, “We take pride in our untarnished record of maintaining the highest professional and ethical standards,” and it operates “paying strict attention to applicable laws.”

Focus was recently acquired by Burford Capital, a global litigation finance provider, and last month the Mintz Group announced an investment by a private equity firm called Westview. Being law-abiding, it turns out, just might be good for business.

Tyler Maroney is a partner at QRI, a private investigations firm, and the author of the forthcoming book “Corporate Dick.”